IFTF's Future Now draws on research and forecasting at the Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto, CA think tank specializing in the future of technology, health, and organizational change. It began in September 2003.

Participatory web service Dopplr, which allows individuals to coordinate travel and inform colleagues about where they'll be, has now introduced a tool for calculating the carbon footprint of your journeys.

Everyone at the Institute is at the Technology Horizons conference today on "The Future of Making." It's rather different from our usual events. Conference attendees started trickling in yesterday at the Maker Faire, and we put them through a couple exercises that encouraged them to...

The cover story of the current ESPN Magazine, "Let 'Em Play," explores the bigger issues surrounding the augmentation of our biological bodies with prosthetic technologies. The story's author, Eric Adelson,...

Maker Faire opened today with a Maker Day—a time for Makers to meet each other and showcase some of their cool projects. As I was listening to Umberto Crenca, one of the founders of AS220, a non-profit arts center in Providence, RI, that provides spaces for...

One of the Institute for the Future's most powerful research tools is the expert workshop-- events in which a cross-section of experts spend a day brainstorming, creating maps of the future, and developing scenarios that look in depth at possible futures and our responses to them. The Institute...

After years of muscling fans into settlements and lawsuits over sharing folders of music on various P2P services, a judge has ruled that offering a "shared folder" of media does not constitute a copyright violation unless there is proof that an actual file changed hands.

Astronomers looking at the long-term future of the solar system have concluded that "a collision with Mercury or Mars could doom life long before the Sun swells into a red giant and bakes the planet to a crisp in about 5 billion years." USCS astronomers Gregory Laughlin and Konstantin...

As most of us know, landmines are a serious threat to both soldiers in wartime and civilians in peacetime. (Farmers and construction workers in Europe still occasionally find landmines from World War II.) Finding and disabling them has traditionally been dangerous, time-consuming work....

For the last 6 months or so, I've been working on a big new project at the Institute. I haven't written that much about it, as we've been... quiet. Now, though, we're starting to take the project public.

The project is called X2, and its aim is to forecast the future of science,...

Standing in the middle of my living room surveying the floors covered with crumbs left over from last night's seder, I finally decided—this is the Roomba moment! I've been thinking about getting the magic vacuum cleaner for a while now but the need was never urgent enough. Not until now. The...

Visualizations of all kinds are becoming a new literacy for understanding data, from crocheted coral reefs to tag clouds to digital heat maps. But that's only the tip of the iceberg. A friend just sent me this amazing video directed by Robert Alan Weiss for Stanford's Department of Chemistry in...